Pages

2008-12-04

Report from Israel VMUG

Well I got there late (damn so much traffic that I am not used to..) but I have seen the presentation before, so there was nothing new to tell about it.

Virtual Desktop Technical Deep Dive (VMware View - it is now called)

VDI was a good product, but this.. this looks like ... wow.. I will have to get hold of an evaluation copy to try it out. The best feature in my opinion will (actually more than one) the linked clones and offline copies.

Linked clones - this has been available in Lab Manager for quite a while and now it has come View. What will this mean. For example - if you have 10 VM's all with a 10 GB Hard disk, till now that would have taken up 100GB space on you storage. Now true with de-dupe, this can be reduced up to savings of 80% in some cases, you will have one Master image that will be 10GB and each of the other 9 linked clones only take up 50-100MB for each VM so instead of going up 100GB - we are talking about 11GB!! Now that is a huge savings on precious and expensive storage space...

"Offline VDI" - Now the problem with VDI always has been - I do not have access to my VM if I am not connected to the network. So I cannot continue my work on the train/plane/bus. That was a real PITA. But - and yes I know this is experimental only .... - but to take my machine offline with me before I go home, continue the work on it while I am out of the office - as they say in Yiddish "A mechaye" which means a lifesaver!! I cannot wait for a chance to try this one out.

I am sure that View is going to be a huge topic for the upcoming weeks and months.